Commentary on the Confluence of War, Technology, and Culture

Gender and Warmaking: ‘The Women of Counterinsurgency’

Noah Shachtman of Danger Room drew my attention to a recent article entitled “Women Prominent in Defense Movement.” Part of a continuing series called “The Rise of the Counterinsurgents,” Spencer Ackerman profiles leading counterinsurgency theorists and policymakers. What may surprise some is how well women are represented in COIN community:

There’s no one answer for why that is. In a series of interviews, leading woman counterinsurgents, and some of their male colleagues, discussed how the unconventional approach to military operations calls for skills in academic and military fields that have become open to women in recent decades. Others contend that counterinsurgency’s impulse for collaborative leadership speaks to women’s “emotional IQ,” in the words of one prominent woman counterinsurgent. Another explanation has to do with coincidence: the military’s post-Vietnam outreach to women has matured at the same time as counterinsurgency became an unexpected national imperative.

“It is not that women are ‘better’ at this stuff than men,” Davidson said, “it is just that the problems associated with populations involve non-military skill sets and knowledge from fields where women have traditionally been better represented than they have been in the military.”

Some of the most signicant contributors include Sarah Sewall of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights who contributed to the 2006 Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual (FM 3-24)–at behest of Army General David H. Petraeus. Another important figure is Montgomery McFate:

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she worked for much of her career in obscure corners of the defense establishment, like the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Navy’s Office of Naval Research. McFate’s eagerness to apply her anthropology background to counterinsurgency led her to design one of the most innovative and unconventional programs the U.S. military has ever launched: the Human Terrain Teams, in which cultural anthropologists literally embed with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan to advise them on the structure of tribal and family relations in those countries, to avoid giving needless offense.

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